accountant, and he has other clients, so he mostly just does the books. Lizzy and I run the shop.”
“But you went to college?” Now he sounded genuinely curious.
“Yeah, I went to Colorado State. I have a degree in physics and my teacher’s certificate.”
“Why aren’t you a teacher?”
“I didn’t want to let Brian and Lizzy down.” That wasn’t entirely true, but I didn’t want to tell him the real reason: that I didn’t want to deal with the fallout of being a gay high school teacher in a small town. “There isn’t really anyone else to cover the shop. We can’t afford a full-time employee. Well, we could if they didn’t want benefits, but they do. So instead, we just have Ringo, part time. We get half his salary back, ’cause he spends his paychecks on stuff for his car, so it works out okay.” I laughed. “Ringo! That can’t be his real name.” I realized I was babbling. “Sorry I’m talking so much. I’m sure I’m boring you.”
He looked right at me and said seriously, “Not at all.”
We had reached the end of the trail. “You’ll have to turn around here.”
He stopped the Jeep and looked around suspiciously. There were no other cars. “I don’t see any rock.”
“Just up the trail a bit. Want to walk up there?”
His face brightened a little at that. “You bet.”
So we walked down the trail, through Ponderosa pines and Douglas firs and aspens that were just starting to bud to one of the rocky abutments that must have helped give the Rockies their name. The Colorado mountains are full of these giant piles of stationary rock, rounded and covered with dry sage- and rust-colored lichen. This one was about twenty feet high on the downhill side. If you walked up the hill, you could practically walk right out onto it. But what’s the fun in that? Those rocks just beg to be climbed.
Once we reached the top, we sat down. The view wasn’t really any different from there. We could see down the trail to the Jeep, but other than that, we were still just looking at more trees, more rocks, more mountains. I love Colorado, but this type of view can be found in hundreds of spots. I was surprised to hear a contented sigh from Matt. When I looked at him, his face showed amazement.
“Man, I love Colorado. I’m from Oklahoma. This is better, believe me.”
He turned to look at me, and I almost quit breathing. He was squinting a little against the sun. His skin was tan, and his eyes were shining. There was definitely a hint of green in them. “Thanks for bringing me up here.”
“Anytime.” And I meant it.
CHAPTER 2
MATT came by the shop the next day, cash in hand, to buy the Jeep. It was a Saturday, normally one of our busier days, so Lizzy and I were both in the shop.
“Will you join me for a beer?” He had shaved that morning, and it made him look several years younger. Man, he was cute.
“I’d love to, but you’ll have to give me a rain check. I’m having dinner with the family.”
“Oh.” He actually sounded disappointed. “Well, maybe another time….”
“Hey!” Lizzy interrupted, grinning ear to ear. “Why don’t you come? We’re just having dinner up at the house. We would love to have you.”
He agreed, and we arranged for him to come back by the shop shortly after we closed at five.
Once he was gone, I studiously tried not to look at Lizzy, who was standing next to me with the goofiest smile I’d seen in a long time. She has blonde hair that seems to fly all over the place when she moves and blue eyes, which at the moment were shining with excitement. I suppose she falls somewhere between “lovely” and “cute as a button,” and I swear she could charm the stars down out of the sky if she tried.
“Well?” she finally asked.
“Well, what?” I knew I was blushing and hated myself for it.
“You know what.” She smacked me on the arm. “He’s hot! And he asked you out. Aren’t you excited?” The fact was, I didn’t have many friends. Most of my buddies from high school were married with kids. The ones who weren’t married were all troublemakers who spent their nights drinking at the bar. Lizzy was probably the best friend I had in the world, and I knew that she was always hoping I would find somebody.
“I don’t think he meant it as a date.”
Her smile faltered a little. “You don’t?”
“Does he look gay to you?”
“Well, no. But neither do you, so that obviously doesn’t mean anything and you know it. He wanted to take you out and was disappointed that he wasn’t going to have you alone. I think he’s interested.” The smile was back in its full glory now.
I felt a grin breaking out on my face. “I’m not going to get my hopes up, but I sure wouldn’t mind if you were right.”
PEOPLE always ask me when I knew that I was gay. I guess they think I had some epiphany—lights flashing and horns blaring—but it wasn’t like that for me. It was more of a culmination of events.
I suppose the first clues came early in puberty as I compared myself to my brother Brian, two years my elder. While he was hanging up posters of Cindy Crawford and Samantha Fox, I was putting up only cars and the Denver Broncos. I was aware of the fact that he found girls enticing and fascinating in a way I did not understand, but I didn’t think too much of it.
One weekend when I was fifteen, my dad went to a Broncos game and brought a poster back for me that showed the whole team with the cheerleaders arrayed around them in various provocative poses. Brian helped me hang it up, and then we stood there for a few minutes looking at it.
“Which one do you think is the best looking?” Brian asked me.
“Steve Atwater,” I said without even thinking about it.
He laughed, but it was a nervous kind of laugh, like he wasn’t sure if I was pulling his leg or not. When I turned to look at him, I found him staring at me with a look on his face that would eventually become very familiar to me: part humor, part confusion, part concern. I was embarrassed. I knew my answer was wrong, and yet, I wasn’t really sure why.
“No,” he said, “I meant which one of the
Soon my friends were swapping skin magazines with shaking hands and boastful laughs. I wasn’t exactly sure what they felt when they looked at them, but it was pretty clear it wasn’t the same as the mild embarrassment I was feeling.
It wasn’t until I met Tom that I realized exactly how different I was. Tom played football with my brother Brian. They were best friends. I was sixteen; they were eighteen. From the moment he walked in our front door behind my brother, I was infatuated with him. I could barely speak to him but couldn’t keep my eyes off him. His laugh was enough to elicit physical responses that caused me to always have a school book in my hand when he was in the house—not because I was such a good student, but because I needed to be able to cover myself quickly. I walked a fine line between wanting to see him as much as possible and wanting to stay out of his sight. I knew Brian was watching me again with the same looks he had given me the day I blurted out Steve Atwater’s name: concern, bemusement, embarrassment. It was something of a relief when the two of them finally graduated and went off to college.
After that, I was pretty sure, although I never said anything to anybody. I faked my way through high school. I never tried out for football because I was afraid of the complications that could arise in the locker room, if only in my imagination. I had a few dates with girls, but they were mostly group dates; we held hands a few times and a couple of them even kissed me. The kisses were, for me at least, completely uninspiring, bordering on disturbing, and it never went further than that.
Once I made it to college, away from home, I finally allowed myself to experiment. I met guys at the club or at the gym and had a few brief but meaningless affairs. Never found anything I would have called love, but I knew after that, without a doubt, that I was gay.
Needless to say, I never planned to be in my thirties and still alone. And being gay in a town this small isn’t
